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Herbert Kline, Filmmaker, 89; Recorded Crises in 30's Europe

Herbert Kline, a pioneer documentary filmmaker who chronicled the political crises in Europe in the 1930's and 40's, died on Feb. 5 in Los Angeles. He was 89.

Mr. Kline called himself ''a foreign correspondent of the screen.'' He saw his job as going beyond the superficial reporting often found in newsreels to interpret events as they unfolded.

Born into a middle class household in Davenport, Iowa, he began to travel around the country while still a teen-ager. He read voraciously and favored the works of Sinclair, Dostoyevsky and Dos Passos.

Early in his career he edited New Theater, a liberal magazine in Chicago, and was among the first to publish the plays of Clifford Odets. Later, he joined the Photo League, an organization of politically progressive documentarians in New York.

Mr. Kline was among the many artists and intellectuals drawn to the mounting crisis in Europe during the 1930's. He went to Spain during the Spanish Civil War and worked for a Loyalist radio station in Madrid. He was approached by Geza Karpathi, a Hungarian photographer, who asked if he was interested in making a film about the conflict, though neither man even knew how to load a camera at the time. Their work, ''Heart of Spain,'' made for CBC Canada in 1937, told the story of a Madrid mother and a wounded young soldier.

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As political tensions escalated, Mr. Kline, who was Jewish, remained in Europe, traveling to London, Czechoslovakia and Poland. When the Germans annexed the Czech frontier in 1938, he entered occupied territory by pretending to be pro-Nazi and filmed rallies and parades at close range. The result was ''Crisis,'' released in 1938 and named one of the National Board of Review's 10 best films of 1939. The film was recently re-released in Europe.

In September 1939, Mr. Kline recorded the German invasion of Poland in ''Lights Out in Europe.'' He returned to the United States to collaborate with John Steinbeck on ''The Forgotten Village,'' their 1941 film about peasant life in Mexico. In 1947, it was honored as Best Feature Documentary at the Brussels Film Festival. That same year, he once again focused on Europe under Nazism in ''My Father's House,'' one of the first films to document the Holocaust.

Although his films exposed the nature of tyranny, Mr. Kline's leftist sympathies got him blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the 1950's. He did not resume filmmaking until 1970, when he directed ''Walls of Fire,'' about the Mexican artists Diego Rivera and David Alfaro, for which he earned an Academy Award nomination. Mr. Kline's attempts to break into mainstream Hollywood as a writer and director were unsuccessful, and he made two other documentaries, ''The Challenge of Modern Art'' in 1978, narrated by Orson Welles, and ''Acting . . . Lee Strasberg'' in 1979.

He is survived by a sister, Evelyn Amerman; a son, Ethan; a daughter, Elissa Kline Gillberg, and two grandchildren.